Chapter Twenty-Two Night Run
The night swallowed her.
Grass whipped her calves and thorns clawed at her skirts as she ran, lungs burning, heart hammering loud enough to drown the world.
Behind her, the house was a square of darker dark and the barn a hulking shadow; beyond those, Thomas’s shouts ripped the air.
She didn’t look back. Looking back would slow the legs that must keep moving.
The ground pitched and rolled beneath her bare feet. Stones bit. Something sharp opened the skin near her heel and hot wetness followed a sting that flared, dimmed, and flared again with each step. She tasted copper in her mouth and wasn’t sure if it was blood or fear.
She plunged into the cottonwoods where the creek ran, the smell of damp leaf-mold rising sweet and rank. Branches slapped her face. Spider silk strung between trees grasped her cheeks like cold fingers. She stumbled, caught herself on a trunk slick with moss, gulped air, and listened.
The night breathed.
Crickets rasped and a small thing scurried under brush.
Farther off, a coyote yipped and was answered.
Above, the leaves whispered. Then, faint and hateful, the sound she dreaded: Thomas, crashing clumsily through the undergrowth, cursing with each step, the weight of his fury breaking twigs and trampling ferns. “Violet! Get back here! You hear me?”
She pressed herself against the cottonwood, palms flat to the bark, and held her breath until her ribs hurt. Her pulse threw itself against her throat.
He thrashed ahead, lantern swinging, smoke-smell and sour whiskey breath drifting through the trees like a bad dream. The lantern’s glow smeared gold across trunks and vanished, then returned, then slid away again as he moved back and forth without patience or sense.
“Useless… ungrateful…” His voice dropped to a mutter of ugly words that stung even from a distance. The light dwindled. He wove off toward the field, bellowing once more into the dark.
Violet exhaled all at once, the release making her knees shake.
Move.
She slipped down the creek bank and stepped into the water.
The cold seized her ankles to the bone. She bit her lip hard to keep from gasping.
The current tugged, insistent, like a hand tugging at her hem as if to say come this way, come this way.
She walked sideways, calves slicing the water, feeling for stones with her toes, letting the creek carry her a few yards before she climbed out on the far side where the bank was low and muddy.
Water ran off her skirt and pattered into the leaves.
She crouched and smeared mud across her feet and shins without thinking, the way she had seen boys do in play.
The mud was a kindness and a disguise both.
She tore a strip from her petticoat—clumsy with shaking hands—and cinched it around the bleeding heel.
The fabric was already stained from other days, other deeds. Tonight it became a bandage.
Think. Grey Horse’s voice in memory was quiet but firm. Listen to the land. Ezra’s, too, a whisper: Road’s fork.
She touched the pocket near her breast and felt the small shape of the carved bird Grey Horse had given her, smooth under her fingertips.
The bone warmed quickly to her palm, as if it had its own pulse.
“Please,” she whispered to no one and everything.
She pushed the bird back into the pocket and moved.
?
The cottonwoods gave way to a stand of scrub oak and then to open grass that flashed pale under a rasping wind.
She kept low, the way she had seen Grey Horse move when he did not want to be seen.
A cloud went over the stars and the world went black; when it passed, the Big Dipper swung quiet and cold above the dark line of the horizon.
She searched for the sky, the way sailors in books found their way, and found what she needed: the North Star, steady and unblinking.
North. Away from the house. Away from him.
The Kiowa camp had been north of Thomas’s ranch. The creek that ran past Thomas’s place angled toward the broader water of the river. The river meant covering high grass, the sound of water to drown her breath and mask her steps. It meant safety if safety existed.
She followed the creek to the river, the followed the river itself keeping to the thinner shadows, pausing often to listen.
Twice she heard Thomas again, slower now, panting, calling her name with a tone that made her skin crawl.
Once she thought she heard a second set of steps—lighter, measured—as if someone with patience were also in the dark.
She froze, heart loud, and waited. The sound faded. A night bird called and was silent.
Her bare foot found a patch of sand, soft and cold. The river widened here, braiding into shallow channels that tugged at her calves. She waded, skirt gathered, teeth clenched. The bandage on her heel soaked through and loosened. She knotted it tighter and kept going.
Something moved in the water beside her, the sinuous ripple of a snake. She choked on her breath and stood like a fence post until the slip of darkness slid away into deeper flow. When she could move again, her legs shook so hard she thought they would fold under her.
She went on.
By the time the waters deepened again, her limbs ached and her breath rasped.
The river’s broad body whispered against the bank, dark as iron.
Cottonwoods massed like watchmen along the edge, their leaves shivering in a wind that smelled of mud and fish and cold.
A drift of cloud crossed the moon, softening the world’s edges.
She sank to her knees at the water’s rim and cupped handfuls to her mouth. It tasted like stone. She drank too fast, coughed, and drank again more carefully, feeling life slide back into a throat scraped raw by fear.
The mud sucked at her toes. She had to move again. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name but the brief stillness was a mercy that made her eyes sting with sudden tears. She pressed the heel of her palm to her mouth and swallowed them down.
Not here, she told herself. Not now.
She filled her lungs once more and then slid sideways into the grass bed that fringed the bank.
The stalks brushed her shoulders, whispering.
She pushed through, choosing a place where the reeds bent over and made a pocket low to the ground—a place a deer might use to bed.
She curled into it, drawing her skirts around her, breathing in the damp green smell until it became a kind of sheltering cloak.
She lay with her head on her arm and listened to the river talk.
?
Time loosened. Minutes pooled and ran, then stalled, then leaped forward without warning. Sleep came in bits and pieces and left her raw. She dreamed.
She stood again in the Kiowa camp in her mind, firelight dancing on hides, women’s hands moving in rhythm, children’s heads bowed in sleep.
Grey Horse bending close, his hands steady in her hair.
Braiding joins the past, present, and the future like us.
The memory of the weight of a braid pressing against her back sweetly.
Blindly, she reached for it before remembering it was gone.
Her fingers found only the damp tangle of her own loose hair, a cold reminder of what had been taken from her.
Pale Moon’s voice slid into the dream like a blade: His heart belongs to the past. If freed, it will be mine. The words bit and bit until Violet pressed her knuckles to her mouth to stop their edge as the river whispered hush, hush, a mother’s shushing.
She shifted and a reed’s dry head cut into her cheek. The pain pulled her fully into the present again. Somewhere upstream an owl called, low and plush; somewhere closer the stalks of grass ticked with the movement of small night things. Her heel throbbed in time with her heart.
She once again felt for the little carved bird in her pocket, slid it into her hand, and held it in both palms as if it could warm her. She cradled it beneath her chin and breathed around it as if it could lend her something steady.
“Please,” she whispered again to the leaves, to the water, to the bone and the air. “Please.”
The river did not stop for prayers. It went on, faithful to its own long promise.
?
A light moved along the far bank—a slow, bobbing glow.
Lantern. She flattened herself on the high grass, making her body small.
The light drifted, paused, drifted again.
A man’s voice carried in thin scraps that the water shredded: “…damn… ungrateful… mine…” The sound had the shape of Thomas’s anger even when the words were lost.
A second glow came briefly and then winked out. The flare of a match? Another voice, lower, not Thomas. She couldn’t catch the words. She dared not raise her head.
The lantern’s bright smear slid past and dwindled. Night fell back into itself. She waited until the river returned to its usual mutter before she let her lungs fill fully again.
She did not sleep after that, but she rested—something like rest, anyway—counting breaths and stars and the beats of her heart. When the sky at last paled, it did so slowly, a gray lifting that turned the reeds from black cuts to green blades.
Dawn smelled of cold ash and damp earth and the faintest sweetness of crushed weeds.
She unfolded her cramped limbs and scooted from the pocket of grass, each movement careful.
The bandage on her heel had come loose again during the night; when she pulled the fabric away, the gash smiled red and ugly.
She rinsed it in the river until the sting steadied into a dull ache, then retied the cloth more snugly.
Her hair hung long and snarled down her back. She smoothed it as best she could with wet fingers, the gesture half practical, half an urgent superstition: as if order on her head might call order to the rest of her.
The day widened.
On the far bank, meadowlarks started their bright, absurd songs. A fish jumped, round as a thrown stone, and left a widening circle in the water. All the indifferent, abundant beauty hurt worse than her foot for a moment.
But I am alive, she told herself, and the sentence felt both like a victory and a problem. Being alive meant more choices, and choices were knives.
Where to now?
Along the river would mean water and cover, but would Thomas follow her there?
The carved bird warming against her palm offered no counsel.
Suddenly: Grey Horse is near. The thought came not as a hope but as a certainty that slid into her bones. Still, she could not sit and wait for rescue as if she were a child in a tale. She had moved away from Thomas and must move again.
She rose, favoring the injured heel, and stepped into the shallows to let the water take her tracks once more.
She waded downstream this time, letting the sun rise at her shoulder.
After a few dozen yards she cut out of the river where a deer path scuffed the bank, a line no wider than her foot leading into a stand of willows.
Deer knew how to move without drawing eyes. She would borrow their wisdom.
?
By full morning the world was a different thing: gold bright and buzzing, the night’s edges softened into distance.
She moved in fits: walk, crouch, listen; walk, crouch, listen.
Twice she heard someone behind her, somewhere out of sight—the clatter that a man who believed he owned the land when he walked on it.
She froze each time, breath shallow, heart a bell struck once and struck again by its own echo.
Each time the sound veered away and was eaten by the day.
Hunger made itself known as a small, complaining animal.
She paused where the willows thinned and picked a handful of wild grapes clinging stubbornly to a vine.
Small and hard, their skins were sour, their flesh slight.
They shocked her mouth but charged her blood enough to make her legs feel less like wood.
She broke off a willow switch and stripped it clean with her teeth, tasting green bitterness. With it she bound her hair at the nape of her neck, a poor cousin to her braid but a thing that made her feel less undone. The motion steadied her.
When the sun stood a hand’s width above the horizon, she came upon an oxbow, a loop of river that had nearly cut itself into a new bed and then changed its mind.
The near bank rolled gently down into a crescent of sand.
Cottonwoods leaned in, their roots like fingers, and between two such roots yawned a shallow hollow, dry and leaf-littered, just large enough for a curled body.
It felt like a place made to hold her, as if some previous fugitive had shaped it once and left its shape in the world for the next one who needed it.
She slid in, drew leaves up over her skirts until the world smelled of tannin and dust and last year’s rain. She let herself, for the first time since running, truly rest in what she perceived a safe place.
Her body trembled now that it had permission.
She hugged herself around the carved bird and breathed until the air stopped rasping and started being air again.
The leaves were scratchy against her cheek.
A ladybird beetle walked industriously across the back of her hand and then lifted its spotted wings and flew.
She laid her palm on her breast and felt the bird’s small shape between hand and heart, the two pulses—hers and the world’s—coming into some kind of rhythm.
Words rose, uninvited. Not a prayer exactly. Not even sense. Just a stringing of small true things: I am here. I am not his. I am afraid. I will move again. I will be found by or I will find Grey Horse. I will not break.
For a long time, she lay there with those feelings, letting them braid together without forcing them to make a rope.
When at last the urge to move returned, no longer stung by fear but prodded by hunger despite the knowledge that Thomas would be searching for her, she eased from the hollow, brushed leaves from her dress, and touched the willow tie at her neck as if to confirm that something still bound the past to the present to the future.
She stepped back toward the river.
The day’s light had sharpened. Somewhere not far off, a hawk cried—a high, clean sound that cut straight through the world and made it ring. She lifted her face to the sky before she could stop herself.
“Please,” she said to the empty blue under the hawk’s thin arc, and the word felt less like a plea and more like a decision made aloud.
Then she put her feet to the path again, alone, the river at her side, the carved bird warm in her palm, and walked into whatever the day would dare bring.